This week’s Strange Horizons story is the focus of a review duel!  The first shot is fired by Lois Tilton:

The superhero story has long since moved out of the realm of comics to become a recognized subgenre of written SF. As such, it offers a number of potentially interesting issues for exploration: What is it like to live with superhuman powers? What makes some of the possessors of these powers turn to heroism and others to arch-villainy? Do superheroes ever yearn to live a normal life?

These are some of the questions we anticipate Joey Comeau addressing with "The Historian:" "a crazy fat lady in a costume" who plays slayer to the supervillains with which her world is apparently infested. Mary has learned that her superpowers, whatever they are, can not help her pay off her creditors, find a decent job, or improve her appearance. Indeed, her entire life seems to be a miserable mess, either because of or in spite of her superhuman abilities. The problem is, that we are given no way to understand the relationship between Mary’s difficulties and her powers. Comeau has chosen to misdirect the reader, opening his story with the suggestion that Mary might be an alcoholic or mentally ill, and holding back the evidence that would explain what she really is.

Thus we spend the entire story in Mary’s mind, in her thoughts, without ever really meeting Mary there. Mary’s thoughts are occupied with her latest supervillain/victim, Gerald Thompson, aka The Cook. Not just with Thompson, but with his mental illness, and in particular the details of his sexual obsessions, and in particular the effect of these obsessions on his wife, Alice. Yet despite these details on which Alice [and Mary] seem fixated, we never meet Thompson, or see him, or learn much of anything else about him.

While this is frustrating to the reader, Mary’s interest is explained in part [aside from her own sexual frustration] by the fact that she has at last found a way to capitalize on her superpowers. By reading the minds of her victim/villains and their associates, she is able to learn their intimate histories, which she is now publishing. When her editor objects to the invasion of privacy, Mary argues that she is speaking for her subjects: "I’m making him human again. People want to think these villains are monsters, but they aren’t." But the editor is not convinced, and the manilla [sic] envelope full of cash he gives her reminds this reader of a sack full of silver.

At this point, we realize that we do not know whether Mary is actually a hero or a villain more vile than her victims, whose lives she snuffs out for profit. The problem is, we do not really know Mary at all. Comeau has failed to cut deep enough to show us the true color of her heart and the moral hue of her soul.

And, for an alternative opinion, James Palmer takes his turn with the pistol:

This interesting, comic book-inspired tale is about a young woman named Mary who is a super hero of a different sort. We join her as she is waking up on the kitchen floor, after a battle with The Cook, a sort of telekinetic Joker with the power to mentally control knives.  Mary has somehow dispatched him in flames, and is going to write his story to sell to a magazine.  See, not only can Mary fly and make fire, she can also read minds, and she gets inside her villains’ heads to find out what makes them tick, to humanize them, and sell their stories to the press. 

I like this story.  It has plenty of ambiguity, but not so much that the average reader can’t figure out what is going on.  Mary’s motives are clear as well as complex: she really wants people to see that these villains she destroys have a human side so that they will feel sympathetic, but she is also selling their stories for big bucks.  But this too is understandable, considering she has collectors nagging her about her $40,000 student loan while she toils at minimum wage in a bookstore.  The Cook’s ability to control knives with his mind gives a nice nod to the inherent silliness of comics, while his madness is both realistic and sad. 

Becky Cloonan’s Lichtenstein-style artwork accents this piece rather nicely as well.